Dr. Ken Ring published a paper in the Journal of Near-Death Studies (Summer, 1993) concerning near-death experiencers who, while out of their bodies, witness real events that occur far away from their dead body. The important aspect to this phenomenon is that these events seen far away are later verified to be true.

John Feigenbaum didn’t sleep at all during his redeye flight across country. He’s not a nervous flier _ he had a dime worth $1.9 million in his jeans pocket.

Feigenbaum, 38, of Virginia Beach, Va., is a rare coin dealer, and the dime he was carrying from San Jose to New York is a 1894-S dime, one of only nine known to exist.

He picked up the dime, one of only 24 known to be coined in 1894 in San Francisco, on Monday from the seller’s vault in Oakland. He delivered it to the buyer’s vault the following day, in midtown Manhattan.

Feigenbaum said he and the seller’s agent will split a 6 percent commission on the deal.

As I walked home one freezing day, I stumbled on a wallet someone had lost in the street. I picked it up and looked inside to find some identification so I could call the owner. But the wallet contained only three dollars and a crumpled letter that looked as if it had been in there for years.

The envelope was worn and the only thing that was legible on it was the return address. I started to open the letter, hoping to find some clue. Then I saw the dateline -1924. The letter had been written almost sixty years ago.

It was written in a beautiful feminine handwriting on powder blue stationery with a little flower in the left-hand corner. It was a ‘Dear John’ letter that told the recipient, whose name appeared to be Michael and said that the writer could not see him any more because her mother forbade it. Even so, she wrote that she would always love him. It was signed, Hannah…

It’s remarkably common for a grandson to take up his grandfather’s major project. This occurred to me when I read recently of Thor Heyerdahl’s grandson taking up his mission to cross the Pacific on a raft. But what really struck me was the BBC story aired on July 23rd documenting President George W. Bush’s grandfather’s involvement in a 1933 plot to overthrow the U.S. government and install a fascist dictatorship. I knew the story, but had not considered the possibility that the grandson was trying to accomplish what his grandfather had failed to achieve.